President Trump outraged European opinion by denouncing his allies on the far side of the Atlantic for their failure to meet NATO’s spending target of 2% of GDP.
Other alliance members, he added, should spend 4% of their output on defense, just like America does. His dudgeon at the Europeans was more than justified: the Europeans really are deadbeats who don’t pay their fair share of the cost of defending their own countries and leave the burden in the hands of American soldiers and taxpayers.
Trump’s remonstrations will fall on deaf ears. Why should Europeans spend money on arms, when they have no intention of using them?
A recent opinion poll found that small minorities in the core European members of NATO were willing to fight for their country under any circumstances.
At the bottom of the rankings were the Netherlands and Germany, at 16% and 18% respectively; at the top was Poland, with 48%. Outside of European NATO, 56% of Russians, 66% of Israelis, 44% of Americans and 74% of Finns said they were willing to fight. The Israeli number reflects the diffidence of Israeli Arabs, who comprise about one fifth of the population. One wonders what would happen if Finland were to invade the Netherlands.
If you don’t plan to fight, you don’t need weapons, and it is no surprise that Germany, with its budget surplus, can’t bring itself to vote for urgently-need funds for its military. Germany’s armed forces are in disrepair; a German brigade designated to lead a NATO rapid response force has only nine of the 44 tanks it requires and only four of the country’s military aircraft are combat ready.
If there’s nothing you’re willing to die for, there’s probably nothing you’re willing to live for, either, I argued in a 2014 essay on the hundredth anniversary of the First World War (see “Musil and Meta-Musil”). It should be no surprise that there is a reasonably close correspondence between the willingness of the Europeans to fight for their nations and their willingness to have children. If you care so little for your country that you will not defend it, you are likely to be too absorbed in hedonistic distraction to bother with children. Conversely, if there are to be no future generations, who will lay down his life to fight for them?
The chart below compares the total fertility for European countries (and adds Israel for good measure; that’s the lonely dot in the upper-right-hand quadrant). The r2 of regression is about 50%, with significance at the 99.9% confidence level.
Russia is indeed a potential threat to NATO, although the likelihood of a Russian attack on any NATO member is vanishingly small for the interim. The Russians are willing to fight, unlike the Western Europeans. Coincidentally, Russia’s total fertility rate has recovered remarkably and now stands about 1.7 children per female, close to that of the United States – and from the available Pew Survey data, that rate applies to European Russians as well as to Russian Muslims.
Russia remains below replacement fertility – about 2.1 children – and its population continues to decline, but far less quickly than the consensus believed it would only a few years ago. Vladimir Putin runs a nasty regime in which nosy journalists fall out of windows and regime opponents disappear, but Russia nonetheless has succeeded in reviving something of its national spirit where the Europeans have not.
The matter of dying for one’s country always has constituted a paradox in classical liberal thinking, by which I mean the viewpoint of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, the English philosophers who argued that governments are formed by individuals who feel insecure in a “state of nature” and cede some of their personal sovereignty to the state in return for protection of life and property.
The idea is preposterous, but sadly influential. If governments are formed by individuals solely to protect their sorry persons and filthy lucre, why would any of these individuals lay down his life to defend the government, allowing those who do not die to benefit as free riders? In Locke’s day, to be sure, the British Army hired starving Irishmen and dispossessed farmers to do its fighting. When Napoleon unleashed the full force of citizen armies upon his European neighbors, classical liberalism had nothing more to say.
Something more than Locke’s notion of a mutual protection society is required if we are to justify the state’s monopoly of violence, its right to imprison or kill criminals at home, and to demand of its young people that they shed blood in its defense. The state must be imbued with a sense of the sacred and must stand surety for the continuity of our lives with those of generations that follow. It must preserve a heritage and a culture that allows our words and deeds to speak to future generations just as those of our ancestors speak to us.
Today’s Europe is something of a Lockean dystopia: It is composed of individuals concerned mainly about their own hedonic enjoyments, who want the government to protect them from want and disease, but have no desire whatever to defend their nations, which are on a slow boat to extinction in any event.
It is refreshing to hear an American president call the Europeans out for the sybarites and deadbeats they are, rather than repeat the old cant about the glories of the Atlantic Alliance and the gallantry of America’s allies.
John Egan And the Chinese invading Vietnam in 1979 ?
I guess you’d like to have a tie-dye shirt competition and smoke a peace pipe.
Phadras Johns Stranglers – No More Heroes…….
Phadras Johns Well said, you should copy and paste the last sentence for many here.
The Left have never forgiven the Yanks for destroying Communism in Europe, and they never will
Phadras Johns Because A Times has some excellent reports and opinion peices it attracts alot of fruit cakes, wumao and russians peddling disinformation (well I hope they know it’s false, or they have been brainwashed.
I just take the ‘micky bliss’ out of them
Phil Salvarado And he’s a fruitcake !
If he’s really a lecturer in a US Uni, God help you.
Troy Savage Do not imagine the Left Wing posters (the only people without real jobs and too much time) represent all Euros. I suggest you go to Budapest and see the staute of Reagan.Oh and most of the Chinese ones are paid for by Peking.
Your views are so predictably masculinist. As if the only choices out there were a) To fight for your country and b) to bring a bad-ass weapon. Since WWII, nearly all of the armed conflicts in the world – and there have been many – have been Cold War proxies, nationalist revolts against colonialist powers, revolts against oppressive regimes installed by the U.S or USSR, or warload battles over resources. Coke/Pepsi thinking is hardly effective in such an environment.
Besides oil…not evident in Afghanistan…there is not one single ‘economic reason’ to ‘exploit’ the countries in the ME. The mixture of Islam and socialism is toxic to any economic activity except the most rudimentary and these societies produce absolutely nothing of any value to anyone.
Personally, I wish America would withdraw all soldiers from Germany, leave the UN altogether and let you cowards fend for yourselves. What would you do? Bend over and take it, like you always have.
The ugly truth became clear when the cowardly St Barak The Warrior, desperate to avoid US casualties or being labeled a colonialist by his own unhinged lefties in this country, unleashed NATO against Khaddafi. A military operation that should have taken three days extended into months while the Portugese and Italian Air Forces launched inept and hoidening attacks of Khaddafi while he happily sat and slaughtered his opponents and their families.
Finally it was too much even for St. Barak The Peacemonger who let the US forces use just enough force to get rid of Muammar and leave in a jackrabbit hurry so that a few years of bloodcurdling anarchy could follow. Letting Progressives run your military and your foreign policy is to close your eyes to mass murder in the name of ‘Peace’. Syria. Ukraine. Iran. Afghanistan. Iraq. Congo. Yemen. Venezuela.
These spineless European ‘Leaders’ of NATO countries make St Barak The Timid look like Otto Von Bismark in comparison.
After reviewing many of these posts I am stunned at how much revisionist history is employed to mask the wholesale murder and destruction that was stopped by the allied powers during the Second War. Would you America haters and pacifists rather we had just stayed home? I’m certain many millions of American families would have just as soon let the Europeans kill themselves. Japan was of course, a different situation. They calculated poorly and we beat and humiliated them. Perhaps we should have helped them less in rebuilding. One less competitor. And of course, General McArther was correct; we should have used nuclear weapons on North Korea; Truman just lacked the nerve.
August Dramstad You know little about history.
Good to know you feel as you do. In the words of Colin Powell, We have never sought land or treasure for our sacrifice in the help of others; just a place to bury our dead. We will avoid pulling you out of the next mess you get yourselves into.
Reading below. The author is clearly right. Europeans just lack the most basic form of national pride. Protect their own.
That they feel threatened by Rusia (Germany alone is like 4 times Russia) is evidence on how weak they think of themselves.
Irony Trump itself dies for retreating for Siria and Afganistán and is making peace in north corea. A nacionalist makes peace better than the deep state.
Phadras Johns Hitler saw the United States as an obstacle to world domination. He therefore encouraged the Japanese to attack the U. S. Japan, as many others did, thought that Germany would prevail over Europe and Russia, which was invaded in June of 1941. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the German army was on the outskirts of Moscow. What Japan did not realize was that by attacking the United States and therefore pulling the U. S. into the war, this decided the outcome against Germany. The Russians no longer had to worry about an attack by the Japanese in the East, and Siberian troops were re-deployed to Stalingrad. This, along with U. S. supplies to the Russians, doomed Hitler’s army, and it also doomed Japan to its humiliating and total defeat.
Japan did not think things through, they did not understand Newton’s Third Law about actions (Pearl Harbor) and reactions (U. S. entry into WWII on the side of the Allies).
August Dramstad Wish I could change history so that the Americans never went "over there" for WWI, and had stayed out of WWII, in view of the comment of August Dramstad. Had not Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the U. S. may have stayed out of the war.
Europeans depend on their government funded lifestyles and the relative harmony on the continent to continue living in their elevated fashion. America has insured their safety and alllowed the European governments to channel tax money into social programs and infrastructure instead of the military. Trump is reflecting how most American’s feel today, and the generous insurance policy America sold the Europeans in the late ’40’s has run out. Europeans will fight their own battles or none at all. But American tax money will pay for America’s security, not theirs.
Interesting bunch of comments….when there is the next physical conflict…don’t call US.
What rot. Tell it to the approximately 1000 non-US NATO troops who lost their lives fighting our war on Afghanistan, never mind defending themselves against attack.
Clearly the history lessons of some are waaayyyy different than the history lessons I studied.